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Luke_A_Somers comments on [Link] False memories of fabricated political events - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (22)
Shaking the hand of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad shouldn't be embarrassing. I mean, it's politics. You're allowed to shake hands with Hitler if you think it'll help.
Maybe additional context was provided in the study so that doesn't apply?
Also, a second good comparison would have been to make up fake positive stories... Is it a matter of adopting excess credence for your allies, or being more skeptical of your opponents?
There was a political battle over Obama's (supposed) willingness to meet with Ahmedinejad during the 2008 Presidential race. See this.
Wait, how many people remember that event (before clicking on the link?).
That's insane.
Unlike all the other things politicians have been attacked for?
I'm speculating here, but my impression is that condemning a politician on the basis of whom they've shook hands with is much more commonly a conservative behavior, and that it may be due to a moral value of purity, such that it's unacceptable for a politician to associate with sufficiently undesirable figures and display anything that might appear to be approval, regardless of whether or not they take actions favoring that figure.
Really? The only thing my brain pattern matched to "embarrassing handshake, political" was the Rumsfeld-Hussein handshake. Google for "hussein handshake" for me claims 15+ million hits, and the front page is all Rumsfeld. If you consider politically-charged-body-language in general, I can recall the US right-wing being upset that Obama bowed to foreign leaders and the US left-wing being upset that Bush Jr. held hands with the Saudi crown prince, but I never had the impression that even this broader category of complaint was common from any part of the political spectrum.
Jack's reference is probably more apropos; this fake story might have been chosen specifically to be vaguely reminiscent of a real story.
I don't remember the Rumsfeld-Hussein handshake making the rounds, and that apparently was before I mostly stopped paying attention to political news, but my memories of how often this phenomenon occurs may not be representative.
If the hypothesis I proposed in the grandparent were correct regardless, then I imagine the significance behind the Rumsfeld-Hussein picture making the rounds is that the U.S. did back Hussein, so the upset was not that a member of our administration appeared to have associated with a negative figure, but that at one turn we built up a dictator when it seemed politically advantageous, and at another framed him as a monster who was worth taking down even if he didn't pose an active danger.
For all that my own policies tend to lean liberal though, I wouldn't credit the average Democrat with being especially discriminating; it's entirely likely that my above hypothesis is simply wrong.